In Pictures: Five Reasons To Hire Full-Time IT Help

When it comes to running a young business, every publication (including this one) preaches penny-pinching. At some point, though, you have to be able to handle a host of tricky information technology issues--stuff that buggy, inexpensive, off-the-shelf technology alone cannot. Eventually, you will have to bring in full-time help to handle the trickier tasks. Here are a handful of them.

Testing

Data Storage

If you have large data and storage requirements, you need someone who knows his way around, say, Amazon.com's S3 storage service. When it comes to data, there's a fine line between cavalier and crippled.

Employee and Customer Management

With any luck, both your staff and customer base will outgrow off-the-shelf applications. At that point, it becomes even more crucial to hire someone who knows how those functions all knit together. You most certainly will need more robust customer-management and supply-chain-management programs.

Bug Killer

There are plenty of cheap software tools on the market--and a lot are crawling with bugs. At some point, you'll need someone on-site--not a 1-800 operator--who can hack a bug on the spot. And if your IT guy can't quite hack it, he will probably know someone who can.